Snowden Inc.

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Snowden has also managed to used the very global interconnectedness that the NSA has exploited to his own benefit, carrying on his campaign remotely via Web chats and, now, a video link from his Russian exile. He often uses encrypted computer communications to engage with outsiders, as he did in an interview in October with The New York Times.

Ultimately, Snowden’s advisers hope that his following at home and abroad increases his leverage in future discussions with the Justice Department about a potential plea bargain that could bring about his return to the United States. “The public discourse about what he’s done increases his popularity and his bargaining power,” said Radack.

Officially, Snowden’s legal team is insisting — for now — that he deserves a pardon, which would allow him to come home without any legal repercussions. However, when Attorney General Eric Holder signaled earlier this year that he was open to talks with Snowden’s attorneys, Radack said she welcomed the opening.

“We’re glad that Holder made that statement,” she told NBC’s “Meet the Press.”

Top officials have repeatedly compared Snowden to Robert Hanssen, the FBI agent who spied for Russia and whose disclosures allegedly led to the deaths of at least three KGB agents working for the United States. Hanssen pleaded guilty and received a life sentence.

“Snowden … was manic in his thievery, which was exponentially larger than Hanssen’s,” NSA Inspector General George Ellard said at the Georgetown conference. “Hanssen’s theft was in a sense finite, whereas Snowden is open-ended as his agents decide daily which documents to disclose. Snowden had no background in intelligence and is likely unaware of the significance of the documents he stole.”

While Snowden’s media strategy has helped him, the biggest factor buttressing his reputation and neutralizing some of the attacks is the massive and serious official response to his disclosures. More than a dozen measures have been introduced in Congress to reform programs he exposed. President Barack Obama — who once dismissed Snowden as a “29-year-old hacker” — commissioned an outside panel to review the intelligence gathering at issue.

After that review group found the NSA’s call-tracking database to be of unproven value, Obama, in a major speech last month, called for it to be moved into private hands or possibly done away with.

“The most important thing that has shaped positive coverage of Snowden is simply the reality that the disclosure disclosed a program that has produced … 30 bills [in Congress and state legislatures], led at least one federal judge to find the program unconstitutional and the administration’s own review board and own civil liberties board — at least part of it — found ineffective and unconstitutional,” said Harvard Law Professor Yochai Benkler. “Inside all three branches of government, people are looking at the exposed programs and saying they have to go.”

The benefits of industry outrage

Another major benefit for Snowden: outrage from the tech world, including leading Silicon Valley firms.

When Pvt. Chelsea E. Manning leaked a wartime video, diplomatic cables and military reports through Wikileaks, some individuals were disturbed by the disclosures of alleged atrocities. However, there was no commercial interest that stepped forward to insist on change.

Snowden’s disclosures, by contrast, have enraged American tech firms. The report that the U.S. government tapped Internet backbones to obtain communications between tech-firm data centers fueled considerable anger, as companies were spooked by the possibility of losing millions of customers abroad.

“I’m coming to think that this part of the story has been underreported,” Wizner told POLITICO. “It’s no accident that the first live public appearance that we’ve arranged for Snowden to speak at is South by Southwest and not daytime television. … [Facebook’s] Mark Zuckerberg has said that there’s no threat to the U.S. that justifies the damage the NSA has done to the tech community.”

Snowden’s support in Silicon Valley’s executive suites has led officials like Obama to be cautious about condemning Snowden in unsparing terms.

And the way Snowden’s disclosures have emerged slowly over nine months and through a series of stories published by journalists seems to have also enhanced their global impact, leaving U.S. officials flatfooted and fearful.

“It just kept the media interest really high for a really long time and let each individual revelation be processed and be thought about, which built and built pressure on the NSA,” Greenwald said. “The more it seems like a real scandal, the more it helps Snowden.”

It’s a marked contrast with the big-bang theory practiced by WikiLeaks, where massive databases were dumped into the public domain alongside long reports from journalists digesting the trove of records.

The ‘suits and sport coats’ advantage

The fact that Snowden remains free — holing up in first Hong Kong, and then Russia — has handed critics ammunition to blast him as a fugitive and tarnished his reputation to a degree. But doing so has let him control how he’s seen and allowed him to take part in the unfolding debate through his series of interviews and Internet appearances.

“There was never any imagery of him of the kind that usually succeeds in criminalizing persons in the public mind. He hasn’t been paraded in shackles or handcuffs or an orange jumpsuit,” Greenwald said. “The only things the public has seen him wearing are suits and sport coats.”

Snowden’s advisers believe that if he returned home he would be denied bail and clapped in jail, essentially incommunicado. And in an Internet age, being on the lam clearly has benefits in terms of getting one’s message out. However, it has also fueled criticism from those who think less of the former NSA contractor because he isn’t facing the legal music.

“Candidly, I think it cuts both ways, because it’s also one of the things that some people don’t like,” Wizner said, adding, “I think it’s important that he’s in a position to be able to make his case.”

His choice to take refuge in Russia, after trying and failing elsewhere, has also fueled criticism and attacks — even from those who favor NSA reforms. Russian President Vladimir Putin has been cracking down on civil liberties in that country for years and is facing a fresh verbal onslaught from the West for sending troops into Ukraine.

Snowden “is lecturing the United States from Russia and not criticizing Russia,” said the Hudson Institute’s Gabriel Schoenfeld. “Has he been asked about the surveillance state of Russia?”

House Intelligence Committee Chairman Mike Rogers (R-Mich.) has gone even further, suggesting that Snowden has shared information with Russian intelligence and may have been working for them when he copied the documents. Snowden’s allies say that’s untrue, and that he had no data with him when he wound up in Russia after failing to gain asylum elsewhere.

Snowden took no questions about Russia during his appearance Monday, but at the outset Wizner did try to inoculate the former NSA contractor against claims he is helping to whitewash Putin’s poor human rights record.

“Freedom of expression is surely stronger here than there, but if there’s one person for whom that’s not true, it’s Edward Snowden,” the ACLU lawyer said from the stage at the Austin, Texas, festival.

Snowden also seems to have achieved a measure of protection from the way reaction to his disclosures has defied the typical liberal-conservative divide. Snowden’s disclosures caused a row at last week’s Conservative Political Action Conference — something alleged wartime atrocities or complaints about waterboarding seem unlikely to ever have generated.

“That has been crucial,” Greenwald said. “That the greatest passions on Snowden’s side are across the political spectrum has made it really hard to gain political momentum against him.”